Tag: Frank Bruni

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Frank Bruni: Nothing About Marriage Equality Feels “Quick”

As the time draws near that the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down it’s ruling on same-sex marriage (very possibly this week), Frank Bruni of the New York Times addresses some opponents concerns that this evolution on marriage has come “too quickly” and “in an instant.”

Nothing about this juncture feels quick if you soldiered through AIDS and the country’s awakening then to just how many gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans there are, just how profound our bonds can be, just how fiercely we’re willing to fight for them, just how ardently we ache to be included.

Nothing about it feels quick if you consider that Evan Wolfson, a chief architect of the political quest for same-sex marriage, wrote a thesis on the topic at Harvard Law School in 1983, or if you remember how passionately the issue of same-sex marriage was debated in the 1990s, when the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was passed.

Nothing about it feels quick if you’re among or you know gay and lesbian Americans who, in a swelling tide, summoned the grit and honed the words to tell family members, friends and co-workers the truth of our lives. Our candor came from more than personal need. It reflected our yearning for a world beyond silence and fear, and we knew that the only way to get there was through these small, aggregate acts of courage.

Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.

[snip]

Ask Edie Windsor. Her protest of the estate taxes that she was ordered to pay — but that a widow with a dead husband instead of a dead wife would have been spared — prompted the Supreme Court to gut DOMA two years ago.

She was married in Canada in 2007. When her wife first proposed to her, she gave Windsor a brooch instead of a ring, so that the diamond didn’t prompt questions from co-workers.

That was in 1967: nearly half a century ago. So don’t tell her that the idea of same-sex marriage needs more time to ripen.

The full op-ed can be found here.

Forward.

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Frank Bruni On Faux “Religious Freedom vs Marriage Equality” Argument

“I’ve been called many unpleasant things in my life, and I’ve deserved no small number of them. But I chafe at this latest label: A threat to your religious liberty.

“I don’t mean me alone. I mean me and my evidently menacing kind: men who have romantic relationships with other men and maybe want to marry them, and women in analogous situations. According to many of the Americans who still cast judgment on us, our ‘I do’ somehow tramples you, not merely running counter to your creed but running roughshod over it.

“That’s absurd. And the deference that many politicians show to such thinking is an example not of religion getting the protection it must but of religious people getting a pass that isn’t warranted.

“As these lamentations about religious liberty get tossed around, it’s worth remembering that racists have used the same argument to try to perpetuate segregation. Esseks noted that even after the Civil Rights Act, the owner of the Piggie Park restaurant chain in South Carolina maintained that he could refuse to serve black people because his religion forbade the mixing of races. The courts were unimpressed.

“I respect people of faith. I salute the extraordinary works of compassion and social justice that many of them and many of their churches do… And I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts. But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.”

— New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni, writing on the false conservative argument of “marriage equality vs. religious freedom.”

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Frank Bruni for the New York Times: “Read These Lips”

Frank Bruni writes for the New York Times:

A kiss is nothing. On the sidewalks, in the park, I see one every few minutes, a real kiss, lip to lip. It barely registers. It’s as unremarkable as a car horn in traffic, as an umbrella in rain.

And yet a kiss is everything. A kiss can stop the world.

The football player Michael Sam recently demonstrated as much.

[snip]

I feel robbed — wronged — if I sense that an awareness of other people’s gazes and a fear of their judgment are preventing him from doing that.

We shouldn’t be bound that way, and on the day of the pro football draft, in front of the cameras, Sam rightly declared that he wasn’t. He did so with a gesture at once humdrum and heroic, a gesture that connects everyone who has been in love and affirms what every love shares: physical tenderness, eye-to-eye togetherness. It was something to behold. It was something to hold on to.

Full essay (covering many of Hollywood’s most famous kisses that broke society’s taboos) here.

(h/t JMG)

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Quote of the day: Frank Bruni for the New York Times

“The debate is essentially over, in the sense that the trajectory is immutable and the conclusion foregone.  Everybody knows it, even the people who still try to stand in the way. The legalization of same-sex marriage from north to south and coast to coast is merely a matter of time, probably not much of it at that.” – from Frank Bruni’s April 5th op-ed in the New York Times

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New York Times Frank Bruni on Paula Deen and racism

Former New York Times restaurant reviewer Frank Bruni repudiates the idea that Paula Deen deserves “clemency” regarding her admitted racial comments, noting that she’s 66 years old and has lived her life far south of the Mason-Dixon:

“Please. All of her adult years postdate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and she’s a citizen of the world, traveling wide and far to peddle her wares. If she can leave Georgia for the sake of commerce, she can leave Georgia in the realm of consciousness.

“Beyond which, people can change, growing past wrongful ways in the name of what’s right. We pass new laws. We adopt new language. That’s the recipe for progress: putting justice ahead of habit, principle over precedent.”